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jonknee writes "Siemens has developed mobile wireless technology with transfer rates as high as 1 gigbit per second. This blows the doors off of '3G' technology, or EV-DO (the high-speed data technology used by Verizon Wireless and soon by Sprint PCS). Not all the specs are out yet (more info is expected early next year), but it uses three transmitting and four receiving antennas. With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015."

If this is a free space system, they might have to compensate for the higher speeds with stronger signals (or live with shorter distances), shannon's law and all - of course we haven't approached those limits yet (I think), so it might be doable.

RTA. They're multiplexing; using several different channels to allow many different streams of data simultaneously. Yeah, it makes it a bit more complicated and error prone in the protocol specs, but it means a faster signal. And yes, to some degree, it will make other mobile broadband solutions obsolete, that is until they spec out the next generation of wireless to use similar methods. Remember, this is something that's going to be rolled out 10 years from now. I'm sure wifi is going to get a lot better i

You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.

Cellular technology *can* be made to operate faster than your WLAN. In fact, some WiMAX equipment should operate faser than many WLANs, and it's not mobile yet but it's cellular. But then again, the client-side equipment will have to work first with a roof-mounted antenna and the base station should

You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.

But you can compare them when you take some of those items into account.

WiMAX (802.11g) - in the appropriate codec for this comparison - gets 70 Mbps out of a 14 MHz channel (a little wider than two TV channels). This system claims 1 Gbps out of a 100 MHz channel and spatial diversity. That's twice the bps/cps, which is about right for using 3-

And which is why, "predictions" like FooBar will happen by 2015 are quite amusing - you really cannot know. For all you know, it may happen within the next couple of years. If there is one thing we should know as geeks, it is that technology can never ever be predicted.

Heinlein (the sf author) had a fairly good rep for predicting things, when asked what his secret was he said (paraphrasing here) ask the experts in on the subject how long it would be before we have technology to do x and divide the interval in half.

This is an interesting link. Is is a gross oversimplification to state that Hartley-Shannon gets 'super Nyquest' rates by using the amplitude to encode multiple bits per cycle? I'm sure that this could be done 'in principle', but in practice, the amplitude is dropping off as 1/r (power drops as 1/r^2) and amplitude is messed up by all sorts of other things (wall, rain, me...). How in practice do people achieve this theoretical bitrates? Do you have to send a 'reference singnal' and use the relative amp

It's not oversimplified to say that, in fact it's a common practice. In QAM modulation systems (Quadrature and Amplitude Modulation), "complex amplitude" (i.e. amplitude + phase) modulates a waveform with not just two values (+1 and -1) but four values (1, i, -1, -i) or more...

The set of amplitude values is represented in the complex plane as a "constellation". At the receiving end, you have to "recover" the amplitude and the phase of the emitted signal, which is the process of synchronisation.

thanks... I should have taken more EE and less physics:-) Then I might be better at getting $$$ for my schooling. Oh well... The world is full of interesting and useful things to learn. Now I can tell my kids yet another reason why imaginary numbers really matter.

Uncertainty principle, as in Quantum Mechanics?! That's a really funny one! The only thing fundamentally limiting signals transmission is noise, which in electromagnetic transmissions comes in its most unavoidable form from thermal noise. There are other sources of "noise" or "interference": depending on the environment, interference can come from other communicating devices, a car's engine ignition sparks, thunder, a static discharge, a microwave oven... And worsening it all, media also always attenuate th

Rapid on demand location based services springs to mind, such as detailed maps and directions. As does accessing music files remotely from your own PC. That'd be nice. Maybe more expansive travel information such as realtime traffic or flight data. I'm sure these would become more and more useful given a large hike in bandwidth.

As somone more intelligent than myself said, "if you build it, they will come.".

I don't think that streaming music to remote locations (ie not your home) will ever be popular as the advances in datastorage densities will always make local mobile storage a better option.
Static data like music and movies will be stored in an iPod-like device, and how detailed does a real-time service like traffic info have to be to require this sort of data-rate?
I'm not decrying the advances made here, but rather questioning the commercial usages to which it can currently be put.

I imagine the new "smart army" could think of a few uses for that kind of data rate. Things that were previously not possible with games spring to mind. Static and dynamic image/video/audio transfer are pretty obvious. Aside from new applications made possible, I imagine many current wireless application would benefit simply from the increased data rate.

I'd think games would be a great use. I'll just pull some numbers out of my ass and say that in 10 years programmable 1 Gig carts for a handheld like the GBA are commercially viable - if you could add this kind of wireless into a handheld then you would essentially have a terminal with a fairly large local storage and unlimited size game, you'd have to worry about the in memory size and IO speed - but the game content itself could be upgraded or released in installments and synched to the current 'play fie

go even further, interactive games that happen simultaneous in real life and virtually. I believe that a previous story talked about how DoCoMo or such had location based games.

Also just think that in 10 years 1080i cameras will probably be as dirt cheap as most DV cameras today. Wireless HD video would bring out new meaning to Live reporting. no need for the camera truck and crew, just 2 people. I can predict vigilante reporting to be on the rise as well.

I am sure that by then they will be aiming for cell phones to all be video phones. While you may not see the need, I'm sure by then some people will be wondering how we ever survived using phones without seeing the persons face.

As phones become less phones and more personal organisers and communicator (complete with a host of other extras), the more people are going to need that bandwidth.

Even if no single application on these devices needs that much bandwidth, the combination of them all may. That, and i

It always bothers me that I essentially have to go through the extra step of transfering any pictures I take on my phone, to my PC.

Imagine if in 2015, I can take high resolution photos (and even video) from a hand held device (we really should stop calling them phones;) ) that is saved directly to my PC at home. The phone can have a small (by tomorrows standards at least) amount of local storage, but the vast majority of storage used would be

You mean a sort of NFS over internet? (Ok, probably a more secure protocol will be used:-)) Well, that would make sense. But I guess only the geeks will have their file server running at home, the rest will rent their storage from online storage providers (probably most mobile devices will have a preselection for a certain storage space provider, just as mobile phones are usually bound to a certain phone service provider today).

My Treo 600 smartphone can email its pictures. The bundled camera app uses a pay-per-send Sprint service, but someone has already sent out their own custom app that just emails to any Internet email address, which is the app I use. The T600 can also HoySync to any PC (that has the HotSync server SW installed) over the phone's wireless Net connection (110Kbps). There are probably other transfer utils, like scp (there's a decent ssh client).

Without the details, it strikes me that this nice bit of hype is entirely pointless.

Great - I 1Gig link. And the power requirements are? And the suspectability to multipath problems in built up areas are? And the size of the antenna on the phone is how big? And the patent issues are what?

Sorry to be such a grumpy old thing, but getting RF technology to work in the lab is one thing. Getting to work in messy, interference soaked urban environments without cooking the user's head is quite another.

Given the number of receiving and transmitting antennas, it would sound like they are using a variant of BLAST - this is a technique that uses multipath to enhance the signal - think of it as doing spatial-domain multiplexing. By using multiple antennas, and using the multipath time difference on the signal, they are able to discriminate signals in the same band of frequecies based upon the physical location of the antennas.

However, the odds that this will fit "in your pocket" as the story poster said are

Well most wireless data systems are rate adaptive, so to be able to use new high speed services you will require very strong signal coverage (even more radiation). 2G and 3G will still be there, plus all the other radio systems.

To us , it'll still be amazing because we'll be past the 35-hump since when each invention is against the laws of nature .

Below 16 , all inventions are taken for granted. After 16 to 35, every invention is the next big thing and by the time you're over 35 , it'll be a violation of your fundamental understanding of science.

So kids born in 2000 see supersonic air travel as an ordinary means of travel , while my father feels there's something impossible about faster than sound travel (someday I'll say the same about Faster than light , hopefully) .

I'm very skeptical of the viability of this for a consumer market and I'm pretty certain I can get 3 randomly selected users to agree with me. Firstly, the large amounts of antennas would suggest this can't make it outside of a research lab. Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES. Maybe they could transmit this much between the tower with a single client (scalability anyone?) but if our current wired infrastructure has trouble managing 100 Mbps then what good will that link be?

Anyway, my point here is that maybe you'll see a speed increase but don't expect anything in the real world faster than a wireless G setup anytime soon. It'd be damn cool though.

Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRESDepends on where you live. I'm in Tokyo and I have 24 Mb/s DSL for about $35/mo. They're willing to pull a fiber to your house and do 100Mb/s for pretty close. Of course, that's just your connection to the ISP, beyond that your mileage will vary.

all these questions about antenna , batteries etc - who knows what we will be carrying round in 15 years - I would like to think that the technology running alongside this new 1gb wireless would also have improved beyond what we have now.. 6 years ago the mobile phone and laptop I use daily seemed years off

Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES.

How much do 100GB disk space cost today? How much did they cost 10 years ago?How much would you have payed 10 years ago for the data rate of a current standard DSL connection?How much would you have payed 10 years ago for the computing power of todays entry level PCs?So, are you still sure that the pricing will not be about right for the consumer market in the year 2015?

Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES. Maybe they could transmit this much between the tower with a single client (scalability anyone?) but if our current wired infrastructure has trouble managing 100 Mbps then what good will that link be?

That's why we should finally start deploying multicast all over the Internet. It's simply stupid that 100,000 people pulling one and the same file from the server saturate its $100k link. Or think webcasts. How easy

I'd like this in my home wireless network, please. And used by Apple in a nice streaming solution for video, so I can stream everything from my home server to my tv. I only use my phone for SMS and making phone calls, so I don't need this on the go. But for home multimedia, well, this really opens up nice possibilities!

I first heard this story about 10 years ago. Proof of concept kinda thing that you no longer need a phone in your pocket. This story actually lends more to us. In the future (our future because we aren't M$, Intel, AMD) we not only are freed from a "phone in the pocket" but we can also "receive faxes on the go".

Please keep in mind, "cellular phones" were not common back then. Instead, wireless communications was considered "sacred" and thus termed "emergency communication system".

... I think new phones will actually benefit from using less power:With " everyone " owning a cellphone, the cells actually start to overlap each other.This opens up the possibility of grid phoning, requiring basestations in only a few central or deserted points - whilst providing coverage through the cellphones that are near to you (and so forth until the signal finds its way to the basestation).

Apart from the health-benefit, the phones would require a lot less power than now. The grid's latency would be

The worst we can get these days are annoying text messages containing ads.
Imagine the possibilities of combining polyphone ringingtunes, stunning visuals on high resolution screens and this 1gbit up/downlink facility for the advertising/marketing industry.
My guess for the future: a serious amount of spam, ads, adware on your cellular would be part of the forseeable future.
Why ads over cellular? Because this technology wouldn't be commercially sustainable without.
Now. Can you say "This call is proudl

Ad breaks in the phone calls? With Google Ads adapting to what you speak on the phone?

The house is burning, you dial the emergency number.

Phone: "Hello, this phone call is sponsored by XY Insurances. Insurance contracts at low prices with conditions better than you have ever dreamt of. If you press 1 now, you can connect directly with our sales department. Our phone number was also stored in memory 1 of your phone." (well, that's where the number of your friend was residing, but at the moment that's a les

What stops manufactorers of PC from puting this technology into PCs. If it can fit in a phone, it can fit in a PC or even better, a... one of those portable hand held PCs (no, the ones smaller than laptops). I mean why not? I guess there must be some reason for it. Wouldnt it be great if our PCs had access to a 3G network or even better, this one?

It's getting like the hilarious Razor Wars... Wilkinson introduce the double-blade cartridge, Gillette fight back with the Mach III, Wilkinson work doubletime to bring you the state-of-the-art Quattro!

Same thing as the megapixel nonsense, the sheep start to believe a higher number means a better product without worrying too much what the number represents, or whether having lots of that thing is necessarily good.

One key point of multiple antenas is that you can have more complex beam shaping. By adjusting the phases (and amplitudes) of each antenna you can build steerable beams by choosing the phases to produce constructive interference in the direction of interest.

This not only allows you a stronger signal between "Bob and Alice" but it allows you to deliver a weaker signal to "Eve" (the evesdropper in all crypto books). If Eve isn't evesdropping, she will probably appreciate not having you contribute to her b

Yup - you should have added that the user should look up "smart antenna". There are already standards to use this in the government, and the cellular and EMT services have looked at it too.
Needless to say, I have worked with this. It is much cooler than just for cellphones

This article is interesting in the standard kind of wow, high bandwidth wireless kind of way. However, as wireless LAN technologies become more long distance (Wi-Max) and cellular technologies become more high bandwidth (this article), when will the two converge into a united space?I know there is a difference in the licensing of the spectrum, but disregarding governmental interferences, prevents wireless LAN and cellular from essentially becoming the same type of standard?

Excerpt from original article:"One of the reasons why multiple-antenna systems are not typically used today is the very high computing power that is required at the receiving end. This is because the information that is transmitted simultaneously by multiple antennas is received by multiple receiving antennas and has to be reconstructed in realtime for the receiving device. This exceeds the capabilities of the typical chips that are currently being employed in the mobile communication industry. The research

Is tech moving so slow that we have to wait until 2015....a decade?
I would think that something like this would appear (implemented) in a couple of years at most - with new phones going for some crazy price so about 3-4 years before the average person gets one.

I can get 1 gig wireless transfer rate.... but only 112k download rate, and I have to pay PER megabyte charges if I connect my phone to a laptop. Now, if you could get wireless phone to wireless phone transfer rates... that would be interesting! With bandwidth like that, you could set up your own long distance network. Use a mux to send all kinds of different data and voice connections over wireless, and make a bazillion dollars. Certainly more than an unlimited wireless ac

This is highly irrelevant, but I was wondering if so many electromagnetic fields are going to make us glow in the dark. Seriously, we have mobiles, TV, radio, Wi-Fi and of course all other electronic devices. Are these devices safe? I know it's not X-ray or gamma radiation but so many emissions in our houses make me worry. I could live with 1MBps wireless if 1GBps wireless is going to fry my precious fragile DNA.

Just for the record, I'm currently studying the non-homologous end join mechanism for the rep

This is highly irrelevant, but I was wondering if so many electromagnetic fields are going to make us glow in the dark.

Nope - they're all in the radio and microwave frequencies. To glow in the dark you need visible radiation, which requires much, much higher energy. E = hf, and the frequency of a visible photon is several orders of magnitude greater than radio. If your phone is actually glowing in the dark, you probably don't have much to worry about because the battery will only last around five seconds

"Baud" is "symbols per second", while "Hertz" is "cycles per second". A bit is a symbol, and the bandwidth is in cycles per second, probably a square (-ish) wave. The actual ambiguity in the article that might be at play here is that the "bandwidth" of 100MHz might be 100MHz centered around a 1GHz frequency, with, say, 10 independent frequencies each encoding an average of 100Mbps. So each frequency in the demultiplexed transmitted signal is transmitting about 10Hz:b simultaneous with the other frequencies

This is a multiple-antenna technology, called MIMO for Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output. Instead of modeling the "medium" (electromagnetic spectrum) as a "box" taking a single signal as input and outputting a single signal, the medium is modelled as a matrix taking multiple signals on input and outputting multiple signals, on the same frequencies and at the same time.

The capacity increase is *theoretically* limited by the max number of antennae in input or output: say there are N transmitters and N receivers

I want 128kbps. It shouldn't add more than 20-30 ms to a ping time. I want it anytime/anywhere. For a flat monthly fee, and don't count my minutes. I'd be happy to pay $75-$100/month for this. Much more and I probably wouldn't bite.

I'm an indie developer, and do *alot* of remote sessions by SSH. Such service would free me (at last) from having to plan trips and vacations around which hotels provide DSL Internet service to its guests. (although, to be fair, it's much easier to find that now than it used to

In practice it would be difficult to get 1Gb/s in 100MHz of bandwidth. You need extremely good linearity in your link to get such a large constellation. To beat the noise figure problem you need either short distances or high transmit power. 1Gb/s links are being researched usning 60GHz carriers and a lot more bandwidth. 802.16 will more likely be used for 4G when low power solutions become available on the market.

Where the heck could they get that much spectrum space? For 1Gb/sec we'd need at least 100 to 300 Mhz of spectrum per user per cell. There just ain't that much spectrum available anywhere below 6GHz. Eventually when the current analog TV channels go away that will free up some space but not enough.